In reality, I have been doing some smaller bits of work on the project as time has progressed.  I just have not had the time to write about it here.  Now, with some distractions out of the way and more time to send in the shop, I’m back at it with a vengeance!

The next step in the process was to tackle the headrest.  If you’ll recall after coopering the headrest it had been in hibernation for a while now.  There actually is a fair amount of work to be done with it before permanently attaching it to the chair.  However, as you can probably guess before doing that work I needed to make a jig to help facilitate the process!

The jig is actually a very useful one for cutting circles and/or arcs at the band saw.  You can see from the pictures that the jig consists of a base with a movable arm that holds a dowel pivot point.  In addition, for this task of cutting an arc along the front and rear faces of the headstock there is also a temporary carrier board with some scrap L-shaped supports to hold the piece while cutting.

The headstock arcs are cut using a 29 ½” radius on the jig.  I attached the rough piece to the supports with double stick tape and cut the rear arc first.  After that cut was made I shifted the carrier board so that the finished thickness of the headstock would be 1 ¼”.  I then cut the front face of the headstock again with the same 29 ½” radius.  You can see that on the second cut the band saw blade busted out from the piece and left me with a little extra clean-up to do.  I cleaned up the band saw marks with a sanding disk on the angle grinder for the coarser areas and then followed up with the random orbit sander at 120-grit.

With the front and rear arcs completed the next step was to trim the ends of the headstock to fit between the rear legs on the chair.  This was done with the same six-degree angle jig I made earlier to cut the rear legs.  This time it was used along with the sled on the table saw.  This was actually a bit of a tricky cut in that the front of the headstock wants to drop forward as you complete the cut.  I did this cutting in stages and crept up on the fit.  The six-degrees was close but not exact and that, coupled with some variance in the rear leg angles and flexing of the legs themselves, rendered a bit of fine tuning with a hand plane before a good fit was obtained.  To be honest, this was probably one of the more tricky parts of the build so far.  In the pictures you can see this process in various stages of completion.  What’s not shown is the drilling of holes in the headstock through the pre-existing holes in the rear legs to hold the headstock.  This was done with a long 1/8” drill bit (because I could not find a long 5/32” bit locally).  I then had to remove the headstock and enlarge the holes to 5/32” with a shorter bit.  While the headstock was mounted in the chair, I made marks to indicate where the tops of the rear legs and transitions into the legs were located.

The marks that I made helped with the next step of drawing arcs along the top and bottom of the headstock.  These were done with a shop-made trammel set at 41”.  I adjusted the far trammel point (with a fixed radius) until I was hitting the marks on each side of the headstock as I swung the arcs and drew them once it was hitting both marks.  These arcs marked the location of the next two cuts on the band saw.

With the headstock arcs cut I moved on to marking and drilling the headstock for the back braces.  I made a jig to locate each hole using those already routed into the seat.  These were evenly spaced across the headstock.  The holes were drilled in a two-step process at the drill press using a 25/64” drill bit.  The first hole for each ws drilled straight and the second hole was drilled at six degrees toward the front of the headstock.  This extra clearance allows the flexible back braces to move freely when the sitter leans against them.

Because there is a large radius along the top of the headrest I then made one last cut at the band saw.  This was to chamfer the top edge of the headrest so that I did not have as much material to grind away when shaping.  I did this by tilting the band saw table to 45 degrees and using a single point fence to help support the headstock while cutting.

In the final picture you can see the headstock after some rough shaping with the angle grinder and random orbit sander.  The headstock is not yet glued to the chair – it’s just held in place temporarily with screws.  Once all of the back brace processing is competed the headstock can be glued to the chair.

Before getting into any turning, Al shared pictures of some of his turned and carved work.  Along with these pictures Al noted some of the inspiration for the embellishments that he does on his turned pieces – many of these ideas come from nature as well as looking at work in other mediums such as pottery.  Al’s advice here is that woodturners should look outside the world of woodturning for fresh ideas and inspiration.  This will help to avoid mimicking the work of other woodturners and will promote the development of a unique style of their own.

Al also shared some thoughts about safety in the shop. He shared experiences where he and other turners have been hurt in the past by not taking basic safety precautions around the lathe.  Ultimately, the moral of his safety story was to always wear a face-shield while turning,   Good advice, indeed.

From there, Al got right into the demo for the night.  Starting with a dry piece of cherry about 9” square and 2” thick, he mounted it on a screw chuck with what would be the bottom of the bowl facing out.  The screw penetrated about ½” into the wood and he noted that he uses the largest jaws on his chuck for this to eliminate any instability in the piece.  Al also used the tail stick to support the piece and indicated that he always does this for extra safety and only removes the tail-stock when necessary, even when using a chuck to hold the work-piece.

Al began turning the bottom of the bowl with a ½” swept-back bowl gouge.  The rule of thumb here is to always keep your hands behind the tool rest when turning a square object on the lathe.  He first created a short tenon for later reversing to a chuck and then moved onto shaping the bottom. He stressed taking light cuts during the shaping process, especially as he approached the edges to avoid chipping out the work.  Al often decorates the bottoms of his pieces as well as the top.  Before doing that on this piece he showed how he shear scrapes the surface for a clean cut to eliminate much if any need for sanding.  He did this by spritzing the surface of the wood lightly with some water and then scraping with a 1” scraper presented to the work at a high shear angle.  This scraper has a slight radius along its tip and is sharpened at a steep angle.  After sharpening, Al hones off the aggressive burr left by the grinder with a diamond hone. He puts back on a less aggressive burr with a couple of light strokes of the hone before shear scraping the wood. Al noted that the water tends to lubricate the cut and soften the fibers of the wood leaving a very smooth surface behind.

After shear scraping the surface, he moved on to creating some shallow coves in the bottom of the bowl using the same scraper but presented at a lower angle to cut the coves.  Al first marked out the spacing for the coves with a carpenter’s pencil.  He does not measure any of the markings that he makes but rather prefers to do them by eye as mere guidelines for the subsequent turning.  With the coves cut, he went back to the shear angle with the scraper, repeatedly pushing in lightly to create a series of grooves across the width of each cove.

With the work on the bottom complete the piece was reversed and held in a chuck by the tenon.  Al again used the tailstock for support as he trued the surface of the piece with the gouge and shear scraper.  With the edges of the piece at a thickness (approximately 3/8”) that he wanted to remain for carving, the tailstock was removed and he proceeded to hollow out the bowl. Again he started with the ½” bowl gouge.  Al performed finishing cuts after the hollowing using a smaller gouge.  This gouge had a more traditional grind at a very steep angle.  The wings were only slightly ground back and he relieved the heel of the gouge with a secondary bevel.  With a light touch and cutting on the left of side of the gouge, Al was able to get a very smooth surface on the interior of the bowl.  The last treatment for the interior of the bowl was series of small surface grooves.  Al also a made a single deeper groove on the top surface of the piece to serve as a stopping point for the subsequent carving.

Before removing the piece from the lathe for embellishment, Al penciled a series of concentric circles on the flat surface of the piece as well as a series of radial lines out toward the edges to use as guidelines during the carving process.  Next he reversed the bowl onto a vacuum-chuck to finish the foot and with that, the turning part of the demo was complete.

For carving, Al used a micro-motor tool from Wood Carvers Supply.  There are many possibilities for these types of machines (Foredom, NSK, etc.) however, this one is reliable and reasonably priced.  Al noted that to get introduced to this kind of work, a Dremel tool would be sufficient.  For most of his pieces Al uses rotary chisels from http://www.rotarychisel.com to do the embellishment.  On this piece Al showed carving treatments with two rotary chisels on different sections of the piece.  He also showed another treatment done with a rotary burr shaped like a small cylinder with a rounded top.

The carving itself was done randomly while using the lines on the piece as a general guide.   Al first carved along the concentric circles and next along the radial lines to create a random, hatched pattern.  Each of the rotary chisels produced different results and Al noted that every piece is different even with the same person and the same tools. Depending on the rhythm of the work and the amount of force used during the carving process, varying results are obtained.  The rounded, cylindrical burr was used in a repeated serpentine pattern to produce another design in another area of the turning.  After the carving was completed Al went over it with a nylon bristle brush in a slow spinning drill to remove and fuzz leftover from the carving.  He does use 3M radial bristle disks for this as well but the hardware store version that he used in the demo seemed to do the trick just fine.

The last step in the process was to paint the surface of the carved areas with black milk paint.  Though Al uses black often, he has started to use other colors as well.  Every color and wood combination will produce different results when some of the paint is abraded off the surface once it has dried.  Al likes to use black paint with cherry because, once abraded, it shows a coppery-colored sheen under the black.  The painting process was quick and simple and after the paint had dried Al used Scotch-brite to gently abrade some paint away from the surface of the carvings.  Typically, he uses some kind of clear top coat over the surface once the painting steps have been completed, though for the purposes of the demo the piece was left at this stage.

This demo was a great source of information and inspiration. Al encouraged us all to take the ideas and techniques presented and practice them. He stressed that there is enough room out there for many unique variations on the theme and that we should strive to take these ideas in our own direction as we evolve as woodturners.

Al Stirt has additional information on his web site (http://www.alstirt.com) regarding the tools and grinds he uses as well as sources of supply for many of the accessories he uses in his work – look for the Student Resources link.

Wood finishing is one of the areas of woodworking that seems to confound many woodworkers.  It seems that there is always much trepidation after spending many hours in the woodshop making a beautiful piece of furniture that all of that work can be spoiled by a poor finishing job – and of course, it can!  Well, I guess we all either have to live with unfinished furniture pieces or we have to learn the proper ways to prep and finish our projects so that we can obtain the results we are looking for.

Michael Dresdner is a woodworker and wood finishing expert that has worked in many professional finishing shops and written about wood finishing for many woodworking publications over the years.  In this DVD, Michael aims to arm the viewer with the necessary information and techniques to: prepare a surface for finishing and to achieve professional results with one of several different types of finishes.  Although this DVD is a bit older now, the information presented is just as relevant today as it was when the DVD was first released.

Dresdner starts with a thorough treatise on surface preparation and sanding.  As Dresdner states – no finish will cover the sins of a poorly prepared surface – the steps to a flawless finish start with the proper and thorough surface prep.  In the DVD, Dresdner takes the viewer through the techniques of both power and hand sanding and discusses the properties of many of the sandpaper products on the market today.

With the surface prepared on several projects, Dresdner then shows techniques for three different hand-applied finishes: a wax finish, hand rubbed polyurethane varnish finish and shellac and wax finish.  Using everyday products and simple techniques the viewer is shown practical methods to obtain very acceptable finishes that will work well on many different types of woodworking projects.

Next, Dresdner visits Chris Minick, who shows how to brush on a flawless polyurethane varnish finish.  This segment discusses thinning the finish for better flow, various types of brushes and proper brushing technique.  The rapport between Dresdner and Minick in the segment is a bit corny however; the information that is relayed about brushing is both useful and complete.   Watching Dresdner and Minick brush the finish on a couple of nightstands shows just how easy a good quality brushed-on finish can be to obtain.

Finally, Dresdner covers the principles of spray finishing showing a home-made spray booth and several types of spray-finishing tools.  During this discussion he covers how to develop a methodology for spraying a complicated piece like a chair as well as adjusting tools for different spray patterns for optimal results. The spraying is followed by a thorough segment on how to clean spray equipment in order to keep it in top operating condition.

This DVD should provide any woodworker with the basic information necessary to understand surface preparation, the pros and cons of different finishes and different finishing methods.  Whether wiping on, brushing or spraying the basics of the techniques are all covered in this DVD.  With this info any woodworker will be armed with the skills and strategies to obtain professional quality finishes in a home workshop.

Don’t forget, if you are a new customer and interested in renting these DVD’s, SmartFlix has offered readers of The Craftsman’s Path a $2 discount coupon for your use. Simply use the coupon code: CRAFTPATH when you check out!

Doug Stowe is a woodworker from Eureka Springs, Arkansas and he has been known for his wooden box making for many years.  This DVD is a companion to his book: Basic Box Making and it covers the design and construction of  his boxes as well as many of the jigs and techniques that he uses to make them.

Box making is something that has always appealed to me.  The scale and scope of the work are such that beautiful and functional objects can be made with minimal material and in a relatively short time.  However, if you have ever made a wooden box, you quickly realize that a good deal of precision and detailed woodworking is required to execute one properly.  This DVD aims to demonstrate the skills and techniques required for every woodworker to do just that.

It is evident from this DVD that Stowe is a very good teacher.  He covers things carefully, and clearly, and in terms that a novice can understand.  However, that is not to say that the material covered in the DVD is elementary.  In fact, this is one of the better woodworking DVD’s that I’ve seen.  During the presentation of his box making techniques, Stowe covers the basics of wood movement and the stock preparation steps necessary to take rough stock to the point where the joinery can be cut for each box.  This info will benefit any woodworker in his or her quest toward any kind of woodworking project, not just wooden boxes.

Along the way, various jigs and techniques are covered as Stowe produces several elegant boxes made from domestic hardwoods.  Stowe actually takes the viewer through the construction and use of most of the jigs that he uses in his work.  Some of these are the: cross-cut, miter, box-joint and miter key sleds for the table saw and a spline cutting jig for the router table.  This is a big plus for viewers that may think that lots of expensive equipment is necessary to do accurate and precise work.  Stowe’s approach is decidedly low-tech but extremely effective.  This is evidenced in his discussion on jig building, including his router-table which is as simple and elegant as it gets!

The DVD also includes the construction of several box designs as well as discussions on sanding and finishing and hardware installation.  Stowe’s flipping story stick method for routing hinge mortises on the router table and attaching box hinges is worth the rental alone.  Throughout the DVD there are many other bits of knowledge from a seasoned woodworker/designer that are vary valuable in their own right – and as an added bonus the viewer gets to see how several beautiful boxes are made!  The designs that Stowe builds are a foundation for many other types of wooden boxes that can be made on the woodshop.  If you’ve ever considered making a wooden box this DVD is one that you should see.

Don’t forget, if you are a new customer and interested in renting these DVD’s, SmartFlix has offered readers of The Craftsman’s Path a $2 discount coupon for your use. Simply use the coupon code: CRAFTPATH when you check out!

Before doing any glue-ups I needed to create some transition blocks that will sit atop the front legs where they will join into the arms.  These blocks started as 3″ by 5″ blocks at about 1 1/2″ thick and will get sculpted into the arms and legs after they are mounted with glue and screws.  Because of the compound angles of the front legs the angles for the screw holes were marked by eye to align with both angles of the front legs.  This was done on adjacent faces of the transition blocks with a white pencil.   Then the blocks were put into a vise at the drill press so that both of the lines were set square to the table and the screw holes were drilled.

With the holes in the transition blocks drilled, the blocks were held in position on top of the legs and the holes were started into the tops of the front legs.  These holes were drilled to depth after removing the blocks to allow the bit to reach full depth.  Next, glue was applied to the tops of the legs and the underside of the transition blocks and the screws were put in aligning the inside faces of the blocks with the inside edge of the front leg joints.

After the glue on the transition blocks dried, curves were laid out on two faces of the blocks.  These curves were done such that they can be sawed on the band saw and/or ground away to fair the  legs into the arms.  I cut two ends of the blocks on the band saw but kept the offcuts to help later with clamping to the arms.  The remaining material will be ground away when shaping the legs into the arms.

I spent a good deal of time dry fitting both the front and rear legs into their respective joints and dry clamping the assemblies to check the fit of the joints.  Because of time passing between the initial fitting of these joints the wood has dried out and a few small gaps appeared.   As a result I needed a couple of tiny shims the close the gaps.  Finally satisfied with the fit of the joints I moved on to the glue up.

I can tell you that the few words that I write here will not convey the amount of prep work and effort involved in the glue up of the legs.  The rear legs were first and involved using a couple of 6 degree wedges to apply clamping pressure appropriately.  The joints were glues with a liberal coating of Titebond III one legs at a time.  Once the first leg was fully seated, then the other leg could be glued before clamps were applied.  After the clamping the excess glue was wiped away with a dry towell and the joints were left to dry over night.

The next day, it was time for the glue up of the front legs.  I rigged a temporary support to hold the chair up as the first legs was being glued.  The other leg was left in place as a clamping point until the first joint had fully seated.  Then the other leg could be glued and the clamps were applied.  No clamping blocks were needed because the front legs have a “built-in” set of blocks in the excess material at the joint that will eventually be ground away to fair the legs into the the seat.

Some of the shaping of the legs could be done with a round-over bit in a router table however, because of the irregular curves of the legs some round-overs required a unique fixture to be used with the router.  This fixture is the donut-shaped piece that you can see in the picture.  The donut allows for the tight curves near the leg joints to be rounded over reasonably well.

I first completed the round-overs on the flat faces of the rear-legs with a 5/8″ RO bit at the router table.  Next I moved to the router fixture with the same bit and proceeded to round over the other edges (all except the inside long edge).  This operation was a bit tricky and required a good deal of attention to stay safe and to achieve good results.   Noting the direction of rotation of the router bit (as it related to the curves) was very important so that areas would not tear out during the routing operation.  I needed to always make sure I was routing down-hill or I stopped short of the bit exiting the piece.  I kept my hands a good bit away from the spinning bit and in some instances avoided routing all the way to the ends of the stock to avoid any chances of kickback or over cutting.

Because I did not route to the ends of the work pieces on all edges, there was some cleanup to do with a spokeshave , rasp and file.  The ends of the legs will ultimately be shaped to final dimension when they are attached and faired to the rockers and arms at a later stage in the chair build.  However, there were also other areas in which the round-over bit was not able to do a complete job and/or where areas needed to be blended to create a flowing curve.  This hand shaping was actually quite enjoyable.  There’s something very organic about shaping wood by hand with these kinds of tools – it establishes a real connection with the material and form that you are creating.

Once the shaping of the rear legs was completed I moved on to the front legs.  The first step was to trim the bottoms of the legs at an angle (~8 degrees).  Then, I was able to lay out the leg outlines from a template for band sawing.  The front legs were band sawed to follow this outline and then a secondary curve was free-handed to define the final leg thickness.  After the legs were marked, they were band sawed again being careful to maintain a square cut while accounting for the irregular surfaces of the legs.

I followed a similar process to shape the front legs, using the same router fixture and 5/8″ RO bit.  However, due to the smaller size of the front legs I used a quick clamp (minus the soft rubber pad) to hold each leg from the center at the leg joint in addition to holding one end with my hand so that I could stay safely away from the router bit.  A similar bit of hand shaping was required after the rough router work.  With all of the initial shaping done on the legs I put them into position for a test fit.  It is starting to look like a chair!

Next up: Creating and rough shaping the arms

When I last left the project, I had completed sculpting the seat.  With that task completed my attention turned back to more processing on the rear legs.

The rear legs needed to have a 20-degree angled cut from the top of the legs down to the arm rest area along their inside edges.  Also, a parallel cut to this one needed to be made at the top of the legs (to match the height of the headrest) along the outside edges.  The result will form a parallelogram shape at the top pf the rear legs which will match the angle of the headrest.

These angled cuts needed to be made at the band saw.  However, because my band saw table (like most others out there) will only tilt greater than 20 degrees in one direction (i.e. it is limited to about 10-degrees of tilt when angled back toward the saw) I needed to either cut one leg in the reverse direction or to find a way around the tilt limitation.

I chose to create a simple 20-degree jig that could be clamped to the saw table and reversed for each leg cut.  This allowed me to make the cuts from the tops of both legs downward toward the arm rest location which is the most desirable direction.  You can see the jig in the pictures.  The riser blocks beneath the jig are just there so that I had more clearance when rotating the legs during the cut so that they did not run into the saw table.

As, I mentioned, there were two cuts to do on each leg.  The first cut was from the top down to the arm rest area.  Then the leg was rotated and the second cut was made from the top downward to match the headrest height.  In the pictures you can see the cuts as well as the parallelogram shapes that resulted at the tops of the legs.

With these shaping cuts completed I next moved to the seat joint areas of the rear legs.  As you will recall, these curves have only been roughed shaped and marked along the seat top and bottom for later shaping.  To do this shaping, I first penciled in the curves to meet up with the lines that were scribed earlier with a shallow saw kerf.  These curves were based on a 2” diameter circle – the reason for this will become clear shortly.

Next, it was back to the band saw to cut along these curves.  The important thing here was to keep the leg balanced on the seat joint area during the cuts.  The picture shows the results. With the band saw work completed.  I moved to my oscillating spindle sander with a 2” diameter drum and I sanded these rough curves to shape until I just barely met the scribe lines marking the top and bottom of the seat. This resulted in legs that will require only minor shaping where they meet the seat.

With this shaping completed, it was a good time to drill the holes to allow attachment of the headrest.  This was done in two steps.  The first hole was drilled with a 3/8″ Forstner bit to counter sink for the the screw head.  With the leg in the same position I switched out to a 3/16″ bit to drill through the leg for the screw shank.  Doing it this way assured that this hole would be perfectly centered on the countersunk hole.

The morning was filled with  some lectures and demonstrations on dovetails and drawer making.  One of the assistants demonstrated the Rob Cosman method of laying out evenly spaced dovetails using a set of dividers.  Then, Jeff Headley showed how he and Steve cut dovetails for drawers.  Interestingly they gang the two side boards together back to back with a couple of brads.  Then they plow a groove on each side for the drawer bottom and lay out their dovetails on each end.  No special methods for layout here – just done by eye and using a shop made brass layout marker for the slope of the tails ( approximately a 1:5 angle).  They also scribe a baseline for the tails first.

Next, it was on to the band saw to cut out the tails.  Jeff demonstrated this by cutting to the line and nibbling out the waste in between tails leaving very little paring to be done afterward.  The remainder of the joint was done in the traditional way.  They did use a 1/4″ block set into the drawer bottom grooves in the front and side pieces when marking the pins.  This was done with the front board in the vise and the side board laying across it and on top of a plane laying on the bench.  The 1/4″ block kept things locked together while marking out the pins.  These are half-blind dovetails and the marking gage was set slightly wider than the side thickness when marking the baseline for the pins.  This causes the pins to be slightly proud after the joint is assembled – they can then be planed flush.  Also, when cutting the pins they make no issues of cutting well below the baseline in order to get as far into the pin as possible – this was very commonly done on period furniture.

We also discussed the fine-line inlay, cock-beading and escutcheon for the drawers. The escutcheon for the Hunt Board is the same as done in the embellishments class that I discussed in an earlier post – it’s put in after the fine-line is completed.  They do the fine line with a shop-made scraping tool after the dovetails are cut,  but before the drawer is assembled.  In this case the fine-line is only about 1/16″ wide.  An important thing here is that the fine line must be allowed to dry completely after gluing before scraping it flush otherwise, it may shrink below the surface when dry due to swelling while wet with glue.  In this piece there will also be some fine-line installed in the top.  The cock-beading is installed after the drawer is assembled.  The top and bottom pieces are installed to the full depth of the drawer front.  The side pieces are mitered to the top and bottom but are not as deep so that the dovetails on the sides of the drawers are not covered.

Most of the remaining time for me on Friday was spent fitting the drawer fronts very closely to their openings.  This took a bit of time, but I have them now fit precisely.  After the dovetailing and fine-line is installed I will plane them down to leave a very small reveal around the drawer.  Unfortunately this work will be done at home in my shop because the class had to come to an end.

After cleaning up the shop and packing my piece for the long ride home, I bid farewell to the school, the assistants and Jeff and Steve.  This was a great experience and I will definitely do it again.  There were no great revelations learned, but rather many, many little refinements in technique and process plus, the comeraderie was great.  I’m already searching for my next class!  I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of the piece with the drawer fronts fitted before I packed it for the trip home.

I did not update you with a post yesterday because I was attending the traditional school dinner that is put on during each week long class. at the school.  After the dinner students are treated to a slide show and/or demonstration by each of the visiting instructors for that week.  This was a great event not only because of the camaraderie that it fosters between the students but also because it provides additional inspiration to the students by exposing them to other aspects of woodworking that they may not have considered.  Certainly it’s a great marketing tool for Marc Adams to promote the school.

Yesterday was spent fitting tenons on the case.  Lot’s of mortises and tenons…did I mention how many mortises and tenons are in this thing?  In fact as of the close of the day yesterday, I was uncertain if we would even near completion.  We also chopped out the mortises on the back of the case and created the tenons on the back of the interior partitions.  Lots of chopping, planing, chiseling, paring and fitting later it was finally time to dry fit the entire case and move on the glue up.

The glue-up was a several step process.  We started with the center of the front of the case including the bridle-jointed top rail.  Steve Hamilton, Jeff Headley’s partner in business and the second instructor in the class demoed the process for this glue up.  In the pictures you can see that two cauls from the center scroll were saved in order to assist in the glue-up and to avoid over-stressing the scroll and possibly cracking it.

Next , the remainder of the front of the case was glued up.  We were very careful to not apply too much pressure with the clamp across the top because it could easily bow the assebmly.  I did not get a picture, but at the same time, the back and back legs were also glued up.  This was a fairly straight-forward glue up because the back is a solid 3/4″ thick and the tenons had been pre-fit.  If things were not so hectic I would have snapped a picture of the completed case glue-up.  However, this process was very complex and complicated…so much that for every one of these anyone who was available in the shop stopped and came to help gluing the process.  That process involved lot’s of glue, mortises and tenons, and was finished by driving wedged into the through tenons from the interior partitions into the case back!  Oh, and by the way…now I know why Jeff and Steve use Elmer’s White glue for everything.  It dries clear and it have a longer open time for complicated gluing tasks like this one.  The last thing that I glued up was the hunt board top – this was a glue-up with two pieces taken from the same board for a good color match.

While the case was drying I started on the drawer bearers. These are glued to the case sides and interior partitions and keep the drawers from skewing and tipping out as they are inserted and extended.  I also started sizing the drawer fronts.  These are initially sized for the exact size of the openings and will then be mildly embellished and will also have cock beading applied.  I’m hopeful that we will get at least one drawer completed on Friday.  In the picture you can see the result of the last two days work on my bench at the school.

The last two pictures show one of walls with little plaques of every woodworking Master’s recipient from the school.  These are awarded to each student who completes a curiculim of certain class requirements.  From there students can go on to a fellowship with an extended stay at the school and working with a specific instructor.  The last shot is another view of the machine room after the days work had been completed.

In the pictures you can see the notes on the blackboard with yesterdays mortising assignment.  Notice the that Einstein’s Theory was part of the assignment!  The second shot is a partial view of the machine room that we are using – Marc Adams School has a bunch of SawStop table saws.  So, my experience with and impression of them is very positive.

We spent today preparing our sides, backs and front rails.  This included tenoning the rails and the sides on the table saw.  The tenons were cut with a shop made jig that straddled the fence. Pieces were clamped to the jig and run through the blade.  There were two stops clamped to the fence raik so that both cheeks of the tenons could be cut by sliding the fence from one stop to the other.  This worked reasonable well however, with a fair amount of people using the same setup, there is a possibility for things to move out of adjustment.  This happened and a few of the early tenons that were cut ended up being a bit over-sized.  So, those had to be re-cut.  I guess it was a good thing to be off using the 12″ jointer to prepare the two boards for the top of my hunt board!  I thought I was in great shape being able to use the fresh new setup.  However, in the fray of redoing tenons,  someone before me did not lock the fence down and my first tenon was cut too narrow!  We corrected the set up an the rest of my tenons were fine.  As a result of this I had the extra step to glue on a shim to my tenons on one end of one case side…I’ll re-cut that last tenon tomorrow.

With the tenons cut it was time to start fitting pieces on the front so that the top rail measurement could be determined.  This was necessary because of the potential accumulated error across the three scrolled font rails.  This involved fitting all of the tenons across the front and dry assembling the pieces.  Speaking of scrolling, we also traced scrolls on the three front rails and cut them at the band saw.  Tomorrow there will be a bit of clean-up on those as well.  In addition, today did a bit of work on the back and interior partitions.  Tomorrow, those will be taken down to final dimension. In the second picture you can see some of the results of today’s activities as well as the state of disarray on my bench.

Tomorrow will be another busy day.  With any luck we will be at the point of dry assembling the entire case.  Stop by for an update!

The day started with a welcome talk from Marc Adams.  Marc spoke about all of the programs going on this week and introduced his support staff.  Following this talk we sat down to some discussion from Jeff and Steve regarding what we were going to attempt to accomplish on the Hunt Board project today.  Today was about sizing, tapering and mortising the six legs on the piece as well as preparing the sides and rails for tenons tomorrow.

Before any work was done in the shop, we received a talk about safety on each of the machines in the shop by one of Marc’s senior assistants.  Safety is taken very seriously at the school and the talk was very well done concerning safe operation of all of the shop equipment, jigs and accessories.  Even though a lot of what was discussed was review for most, I definitely picked up several things regarding technique that I can employ to stay even safer in the shop.  Marc’s assistants are all very knowledgeable and will always point out helpful suggestions one tool use in order to give you better and safer results.

One thing I had wondered about in coming to a class like this was how things would be managed to keep everyone on pace and with somewhat predictable results.  The answer is that things were batched and several like machines were set up by Jeff ans Steve to do certain operations.  Then, groups of students would migrate through the each setup to complete the operations.  Of course we were also able to do other things in the shop but by batching things like this and assuring that pieces were machined usin common setups, a lot of the variability is minimized.

So, today I started with a pile of stock that I pre-milled at home (I also did some glue-ups as necessary at home).  The focus for today was tapering the six legs.  Most of these cuts were done on the table saw with a slde that clamped the leg via toggle-clamps at an angle as it was fed through the saw.  However, the two center legs required tapers on three sides.  So, two of the three tapers for those were done on the band saw.  All of the tapered faces were cleaned up with a smoothing plane.

Next up were the mortises – and let me tell you, that there were a lot of them to cut!  After some careful note taking and time laying out the joints on adjacent faces of the legs we moved to the mortisers.  I don’t own a mortiser so, I typically cut my mortises with a router.  The mortisers at the worked well but they do leave a bit of a rough surface that required a little paring with a sharp chisel.

We also spent some time cutting our sides and front rails to size to be ready for creating tenons tomorrow.  I have some nice curly Cherry stock for the drawer fronts and front rails so, I also took some extra time to orient these pieces for the best composition – painting with the grain if you will.  Hopefully, the extra time that I spent here will pay off in the finished piece.

In the picture you can see the sign posted over one of the doorways from the machine room going into our bench room.  The second shot is the laser engrave plaque that each student gets when the take a week long class at the school.  These are displayed on the front of your bench while at the class and are a nice memento of the week to bring home.

More to come tomorrow.  While I have a lot to do to build the piece, I’ll do my best to get some more detailed pictures of  things as I go.

I started out by applying more cross-band veneer to my piece.  These were strips in between the semi-circular corner elements.  This process differed a bit from day 1 in that we were fitting pieces of veneer to a specific opening rather than scribing for the opening from an existing piece of veneer.  I did a thorough job of getting my dry joints nice and tight only to find out that veneer really stretches when it comes into contact with water-based glue!  This was not an issue, just another part of the process as I learned the technique for slicing the pieces of veneer to create an invisible joint.  The interesting part here is that it is actually best to do this in the middle of the srtip rather than at the ends.  This way you can overlay the long pieces and get a perfect scarf joint.

After this was completed and while the glue was drying, I moved on to creating a lock escutcheon.  This was done with a cardboard template much like the semi-circular corners were done.  Thin white cardboard makes a cheap and easily tooled template materials for these kinds of tasks.  I layed out the pattern on some thin stock and then drilled two holes and drew in the outline of the remainder of the escutcheon.  The escutcheon was cut out on a scroll saw and the bottom edges were undercut with a gouge and hand plane to provide a tight fit when inlayed into the piece.  The recess for the escutcheon was done with a small hand held router and a 1/16″ bit.  It will be installed slightly proud of the surface and scraped flush.

When the glue on the cross-banding was dry we moved on to edge banding.  The rebates for this were done with a sacrificial fenceon the table saw with part of the blade buried in the fence.  The top surface was first scribed with a marking guage and then the rebate was created on the table saw.  The scribe step eliminated and tear out as long as the cross-band venweer was glued to the surface well.  Mine worked out fine.  The edge banding was mitered at all four corners.  This was done one piece at a time mitering the dry banding with a chisel.  Of course the last corner took some additional fitting to obtain a tight joint.

Throughout the day we broke for short lectures on various topics including: bell flower and fan inlay, escutcheon inlay, edge banding and even a couple of unexpected things like door assembly with coped inside corner molds, scratch-stock jigs for cutting flutes/reeds on columns…there was even a quick discussion about doing flared federal-style feet on case pieces.

The weekend went quick but I learned a lot. I’m really looking forward to starting on the Huntboard tomorrow.

This class is an exploratory of different kinds of mainly Federal-style embellishments.  We are creating a mock-.up that ultimately might be a drawer front on a piece. However,  we are doing some other things with it that would also be appropriate for a table leg or top.  This is all in the spirit of learning and trying different techniques to be used later on our own pieces rather than creating a functional piece during class.

The base material for our piece is a poplar board.  Today we veneered one entire face with a light colored Mahogany.  Jeff and Steve use Elmers White glue for their veneering work due to the fact that it dries clear and is reversible with water and heat.  In fact, that reversibility enters into their technique for adding other features to the piece after the face veneer is applied.

In the pictures (sorry for the blurry one) you can see a bit of what we did today. After the face veneer was clamped for about an hour we cleaned up the bleed-through of glue with a card scraper and scored around the edges in preparation for cross band veneers of a different species.  Then the scored areas were coated with water and covered with a wet cloth and a hot iron was used to loosen the veneer.  With a sharp chisel we lifted those areas and then re-clamped the piece to dry.  You also can see the rounded corners made from a darker Mahogony veneer.  These cross banded corners were made from two pieces cut at 45 degrees to keep the grain in a cross-wise orientation as you go around the corner.  More cross banding will be put in between the corners all around the piece.

Tomorrow, we”ll be inlaying a small fan and some bell flowers as well as the remainder of the cross-banding and also applying a another stringing/banding all around the edge of the piece.  In the interests of time, the fan and bell-flowers were pre-made at a veneer factory.  Today we cut them out of larger sheets with a knife.  An interesting fact that Jeff mentioned to us was that in the days when this kind of period furniture was being made, there were people who specialized in things like inlay, carving and turning, etc.  Furniture makers would often buy their banding, fans, bell-flowers and things like that from those makers for incorporation into their furniture pieces.

I’m having a great time so far and looking forward to more tomorrow.  The Marc Adams School is a great place with alot of talented and creative individuals and it certainly gets my woodworking juices flowing!  Oh, and did I mention the free ice cream machine in the cafeteria…

With my pending trip to the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, I thought that this year to do my part for Woodworkers Safety Week 2009 I would share a couple of basic safety principles that Marc Adams espouses and that I have followed in my shop for many years.

The 12″ and 3″ Rules

These rules are extremely simple in concept but following them in practice will do a tremendous amount to keep you safe in the shop.  Simply stated these rules are as follows:

• The 12″ rule says that you should avoid machining any piece of stock that is that 12″ or less in length.
• The 3″ rule says that you should always keep your hands at least 3″ from any guard on a piece of machinery when using it.

To me any piece that is 12″ or less in length is a potential accident waiting to happen.  Whether you want to joint, plane or rip it, if it’s that small you would be well served to find a non-powered way to do so. Here’s why:

• On a jointer, a 12″ piece either on edge or on its face could easily tip into the cutting head and be kicked back.  If the piece is kicked back your hands can easily be directed into the cutters with disastrous results.
• On a planer, kickback is rare.  However, depending on your planer type, the distance between the pinch rollers on the machine is about 12″.  As a result, problems can occur if a piece that is too short is fed into a planer and is in contact with the knives but not restrained by the rollers.  Unless you back up the shorter piece with a longer one of equal thickness, it’s best to bring it to desired thickness using another method.
• On the table saw, a 12″ piece can be hard to control when ripping.  Because of its size, it may have the tendency to move away from the fence and into the rear of the spinning blade causing a significant potential for kickback.
• Similarly, when crosscutting using the miter saw or table saw, a piece this small is very difficult to control (unless you are just trimming an end) and can put your hands too close to the spinning blade to be safe.

The best way to avoid contact with the blades and cutters on our machinery is to keep our hands at a safe distance.  Following the 3″ rule is actually very simple in practice.

• On the jointer always use push blocks between your hands and the stock. Avoid placing your hands directly on the wood so that they will pass over the blades when using the machine.  When edge jointing, ride the rear (pushing) hand on top of the wood and along the top of the fence.  Move the other (clamping) hand around the blade guard to the outfeed side to maintain clamping pressure against the fence.
• On the planer keep your hands more than 3″ away from the infeed and outfeed sides of the machine.
• On the table saw always use a push stick to rip stock that would cause you to come closer than 3″ from the guard.  Similarly, when cross cutting never crosscut short stock that would cause you to violate this rule unless it is safely clamped to the miter guage or cross cut sled.
• On the router table use push sticks or blocks to operate on narrow stock.  Feather boards and or auxiliary fences and guards are also helpful to keep your hands away from the spinning cutter.

While there may be rare exceptions when a 12″ piece of stock could be cut without issue (for example on the bandsaw) I rarely find the need to.   I can almost always plan my work so that I am working with larger stock.

Obeying these simple rules in the shop has kept me fairly safe and trouble free over many years.  So, when that voice in your head tells you that something you’re about to do isn’t safe, don’t do it because it probably ins’t…if you analyze the operation you’ll most likely find that it is probably violating one of these rules!

I had been thinking about the possibility of taking a class or two in some facet of woodworking.  For years, I’ve procrastinated and never acted on those thoughts.  Finally, this year I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. I’m going to be there for a weekend class (May 9-10) on Embellishments including stringing, cross-band veneering and other inlaid features.  Following that I will be staying on during the following week (May 11-15) for a class building a Virginia/Carolina Sideboard.  These  classes will be with Jeff Headley and Steve Hamilton.  Jeff is a forth-generation cabinetmaker and has written for Fine Woodworking and Steve works with Jeff in his woodworking business building period reproduction furniture.  The picture shows Jeff’s version of the Huntboard that I’ll be building.  I’m really looking forward to this class for the opportunity to learn some new techniques and to improve my skills – especially in the hand tool area.

As evidenced by my lack of posts on the Sculpted Rocking Chair recently, I’ve been gathering and prepping materials for the Huntboard.  So, my progress on the rocking chair will be on hold for a bit while I go off to school. I’ll be back at that project as soon as I get home.  Also,  I plan on blogging about my time at the Marc Adams School as well as progress during the classes so, keep an eye out here for updates.

Well, maybe after a quick commercial interruption…you’ll recall that in the last post I had glued the two perfectly good front legs together with a piece of two inch stock in between them.  Well, of course they were not going to stay that way.  So, I traced a curve onto the adder piece between the legs and then cut them apart on the band saw.  The front legs will be cut and sculpted further at a later stage.  Now that that was out of the way, I could turn my attention to the first efforts of sculpting on the chair – shaping the seat.

To start this process, I first layed out the outline of the seat area from my templates.  Next, I carefully layed out the locations for some depth holes.  I drilled these holes into the seat to help me judge when the sculpting had reached the desired depth.  The rear holes were drilled at 3/4″, the center holes at 5/8″ and the two sets of front holes at 1/2″.

To do the rough shaping I used a coarse Kutzall donut-shaped disk in an angle grinder.  This disk removed material very quickly and produced copious amounts of dust!  However, if careful I was capable of fairly fine work with it.   The key was to use slow, steady movements of the grinder in the direction against its rotation.  I started the shaping at the rear of the seat, staying about 1/4″ away from my layout lines and gradually working toward the finished depth.  When I was about 1/8″ away from the finished depth I moved to the front to work it to a similar level.  The center keel of the seat had to be shaped manually as I went along.  After I got the entire seat to within about 1/16″ of finished depth, I carefully used the grinder to shape up to my layout lines.  The sequence of pictures below shows the process from start to finish.

The next step was to move on to sanding with the random orbit sander.  I started this with 60 grit to even out the coarse surface left by the grinder and then moved on to 120 grit.  I also used folded sandpaper and my thumb to ride the curved surface along the edge of the shaped seat leaving a crisp line along the top.  In the picture, you can see how rough the surface was prior to sanding. A little more layout on the front of the seat, some filing and some sanding and I had contoured the front of the seat to allow the user’s legs  to wrap nicely over the front edge of the seat.

In the final pictures you can see the final shaped seat ready to be joined with the legs.

Next up: Shaping the rear legs and arm rests

As you will recall, in my last post I created the joints in the seat that will receive the legs.  These joints essentially have a tongue that must mate with a corresponding grove in the legs. There’s a bit more too it, as you will see, but that’s the basic premise.

Before I could create this joinery on the legs, I needed to do two things: for the rear legs, I needed to create profile on the inside faces and visible from the front and on both the front and rear legs I needed to add some material to make parts of the legs wider.

In the pictures you can (barely) see the outlined profile toward inside of the rear legs which was to be cut on the band saw.  Because the legs had already been contoured, these cuts were a bit tricky.  I was careful to be sure that there were always two points of the leg in contact with the saw table – sometimes one of those points was at the edge of the table as the leg was either entering the table or leaving the table. This allowed the cut to be completed safely even though it was sometimes happening at a point elevated above the table. In the second picture you can see the profiles cut on the inside of the rear legs.

After profiling the rear legs I milled adder pieces for both the front and rear legs.  The front adder piece runs the length of the legs. The rear adder piece runs just between the sections that will eventually contact the seat.  For the front legs, the adder piece will be profiled to become the outside of the legs. For the rear legs the adder piece was ripped at the band saw after gluing in preparation for more detailed operations to follow.

The rear legs of the chair need to cant outward at the top at an angle of six degrees.  In order to accomplish this, the adder pieces on each rear leg must be ripped at six degrees from the outside faces of the legs.  In order to accomplish this, I created a jig to use at the table saw.  The jig is designed to ride against the fence on the saw and it has a fence of it’s own that is fixed at six degrees to the table saw blade.  With a leg clamped to the jig the piece was pushed through the blade cutting off a six degree wedge. For the other leg, the jig was rotated 180 degrees and the other leg was cut in a similar fashion.

I took this opportunity to clamp the legs together in the vise using the angled offcuts from the previous operation so that I could smooth the seat joint area and square it to the angled faces which were previously cut on the table saw. After achieving smooth and square faces, I laid out for the joinery that will join the legs to the seat.

The notches to accept the seat joinery were cut on two faces of the rear legs using a sled on the table saw.  Because each leg had only a small bearing surface resting on the sled, I clamped a block to the outboard side of the legs to prop them up at the correct angle.  One leg was cut in the orientation as shown in the picture and the other leg was done at 180 degrees from this orientation. The notches were nibbled away with repeated passes of the leg over the table saw blade until the joint would just fit the seat. Once the rough notches were cut, I cleaned up the saw marks with a shoulder plane.  The last step for this joint was to round over the inside corner of this joint to match the corresponding rebate that was cut into the seat.  I did this with a ¾” round over bit in the plunge router.  Because of the small size of the area where I could rest the router, this did not give optimal results. So, I subsequently repeated this step with the same bit in the router table.  In the picture, you can see the general fit of the rear leg into the seat.

The front leg joinery was done in a similar manner to the rear legs.  However, the notches were made on three faces of the legs. Also, this joinery was done prior to gluing the adder piece to the two front legs.  In the pictures you can see the competed front leg joinery and the adder piece being glued between the outside surfaces of the two front legs after the joinery was completed.

Next up: Sculpting the seat

The joinery starts on the seat blank.  So, I first used a sled on the table saw to trim the seat to finished length and width. The rear legs will be joined to the seat via a 3 inch by 3 inch cutout that is rabetted top and bottom on each back corner.  The front legs have a  similar configuration except they are set back from the front corners into a 2 inch wide notch in the seat.

These joints need to be very precise and with the thickness and size of the seat blank, that’s a challenge. In order to create the notches to exact size, I first laid out the joints with a pencil and then rough cut them at the band saw.  This allowed me to get very close to the lines without worrying about the precision of the joints. The rear leg notches were cut out as single blocks.  However, because the front legs are attached set back from the front corner, I used the band saw to create a series of kerfs to rough out the notches for them.

I created a couple of jigs to help with the process of precisely finishing these notches.  In the picture you can see the front and rear leg jigs that I made to use with the router with a top bearing pattern bit.  The openings on the jigs are exactly the size of the notches to be cut and the bearing on the bit rides along the edges of the jig to trim away excess material from the joint leaving a perfect notch.  Because of the thickness of the seat, my pattern bit would not cut the entire rear leg joint in one pass. So, I first used the rear leg jig from the top and then again from the bottom to finish the joint.  After routing the rear notches, I used a sharp chisel to remove the radius left by the router bit and to square up the inside corners of the notches.

The second operation for this joint was to create a rebate along both the top and bottom of each notch.  This effectively leaves a tongue in the center of each notch that will later mate with a corresoponding groove in the legs. This was done with a series of shallow passes with a 1 1/2″ by 1/2″ rabetting bit.  In the pictures you can see that I used a scrap block clamped to the outside of the seat to eliminate any tearout. The resulting rebate leaves a 3/4″ radius on the inside corners of each notch.  Later the corners of the legs will be rounded over with a corresponding 3/4″ rounding over bit to create complementary profile on the legs.

With the joints for the front and rear legs completed I setup another jig to rout holes for the back braces where they enter the seat.  These were done with a template that I got from Hal Taylor.   The holes were routed with a 1/4″ straight bit and a 5/8″ OD collar on the router.  These holes are actually slightly oval in order to allow the back braces to flex slightly as you sit in the chair.

Next up: Leg Joinery

There are a bunch of potential ways to do laminations of this type – everything from a using a vacuum bag to building a form and using veneer screws to create a press. I don’t have any vacuum press equipment or veneer screws so I elected to make a couple of forms to be used with clamps for this process.

The forms were built out of construction lumber that I laminated together to double thickness and squared up with the jointer and planer. I then band sawed the curves into each form and carefully smoothed the curves to eliminate any flat spots  This is especially important for the rocker form because a flat spot on a rocker will be easily felt when rocking in the chair.  Next, I drilled a series of holes in each form to accept the heads of C-clamps. Along one edge of each form are metal stops (I used some scrap aluminum angle and steel straps that I had lying around). These stops allow the parts to be aligned evenly along one edge while they are being laminated.

As a first step, I laminated a backer strip on each form with the extra strips that I had previously cut.  This allowed be to get acquainted with the clamping process and to determine how much glue to use and open time I would have.  After the backers were dried I cleaned up the glue squeeze-out and trimmed them to be slightly narrower than the finished parts will be.

The moment of truth arrived and it was time to laminate the first rocker. I went about the process of spreading the glue as quickly as I could. I am using Titebond III for the gluing and it does not allow a lot of extra open time – the rockers have 9 strips so I had to move fast.  With the wet stack on the form I went to work clamping – progressing from front to back on the rocker with the stack lightly clamped to the metal alignment strips.  In the end it worked out OK, but let’s just say I had no time to spare when tightening that last clamp and let me tell you, there was a lot of glue squeeze-out! I left the rocker to dry in the form for 24 hours.  Laminating the second rocker went a bit smoother as I was more prepared and familiar with the sequence of operations.

In the picture you can see the stacks of strips for the back braces.  I am using Ash for the two inner strips for flexibility (I am also using original Titebond for this to avoid the dark glue lines that Titebond III would give).  The Walnut strips on the front and back of the stacks were cut in sequence from the same piece of stock to give a visual repetition to the braces when viewed from the front and back of the chair.

The process for laminating the back braces is similar to the rockers except that they are done two at a time – one on top of the other. This process does alter the curves of the top brace somewhat when compared to the bottom brace. However, they are laminated in an order such that the bottom braces (with the greatest curves) are placed toward the outside of the chair and the top braces are placed toward the inside.  This results in a change in the curves that is consistent across the back of the chair. With seven back braces, this arrangement requires four gluing operations with a 24 hour drying period in between each.  While that’s going on, I can move on to some joinery for the chair.

Next up: Joinery for the seat and legs

The headrest (as well as the back braces of the chair) curves substantially to provide a more comfortable position while sitting. To obtain the necessary curve for the headrest you either need a very thick piece of stock (with a lot of resulting waste) or the pieces must be put together using a process known as coopering. For this headrest I am coopering individual pieces of stock with the grain oriented vertically.

The coopering process is much like the process that would be used to build a wooden barrel. The individual pieces are beveled on along their edges so that when glued together they form a segmented curve. The bevel angle on each edge can vary depending on how much of an overall angle or curve is desired and also how many pieces are being assembled. In my case, I needed an overall width of about 26″ for the headstock with an overall included angle of 40 degrees. I started with six pieces at 8″ high by about 4 to 5 inches wide.  The six pieces provided 5 interior glue joints (the ends of the headstock are not beveled). Each of these joints has two edges to bevel.  Put that all together and you have 10 bevels to provide a total of 40 degrees which equates to 4 degrees per bevel.

To create the bevels I elected to make multiple passes over my jointer with the fence set at 4 degrees from vertical. With a setup for a very light cut (less than 1/32″ per pass) this operation was much safer than using the table saw with the relatively small size of these pieces. After the beveling was done on the jointer I elected to take a few swipes with a hand plane over each edge to eliminate the mill marks and to assure a pristine glue surface.  In the picture you can see the pieces dry fit after beveling the edges.

Because of the bevels on these pieces, the glue up operation was very tricky.  The glue up of the six pieces was initially done in three pairs. Next, two pairs were glued to each another with the use of angled blocks faced with sandpaper adhered to the clamps. Because the headrest now exceeded the depth of the heads on my clamps, the final glue up required the addition of some temporary blocks glued to the headrest to act as clamping points. At a later stage, these glue blocks will be cut off and the curve will cut into the headstock at the band saw.  In the pictures you can see the sequence of this series of gluing operations.

Setting the glued up headstock aside, I moved on to cutting the thin strips for the laminated rockers and back slats. This was a repetitive operation that required precision and safety.  So, I created a simple jig to allow me to rip thin strips at the table saw to a very tight dimensional tolerance. The jig also allows the strips to be ripped on the waste side of the blade so that strips can be ripped from a larger piece of stock and avoiding the dangers of trying to do this between the blade and the fence.

Each rocker requires 9 strips at 1/8″ thickness and each back slat requires four strips at 90 thousandths of an inch thickness. For the rockers, I made additional strips because some will be needed to create stacks under each leg where they join the rockers.  I also made some extra strips to create a curved backer for use when these strips are later laminated with a clamping form. There are seven back slats required but I made an extra for safety as well as some additional strips to create a backer. for their glue up as well.  In the picture you can see the resulting strips for the rockers.

Next up: Bent lamination and creating the leg joints in the seat